On the Granta website is an essay by Casper Henderson called ‘Barely Imagined Beings’ (Book of same name just out). In it he shows An image from the Chauvet cave paintings, which are over 30,000 years old.

It is a scene of lions about to attack. Casper quotes from David Quammen’s book (Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind), who writes that the scene has been painted not with fear but ‘a skilled hand, a calm heart,and an attentive, reverential eye.’

Is this the earliest evidence for the universal human capacity for mindfulness, through mindful art?